In an effort to for a better way to watch my movies I searched a ton of different media servers and ways of sharing. What i was looking for was pretty basic. I wanted a media server that could stream to all of my devices on the LAN and through the Internet. Then I came across Serviio. This server can do almost anything and runs on Linux, Windows, or Mac. So I set out to do a little more research on this an learned it did everything I wanted and more. So lets start out with features and other specs for the server.

I think it is worth mentioning that Serviio has a free and Pro edition. The free edition starts out with Pro for 15 days and then convert to the free on. The differences are pretty minimal but the Pro edition had the features I needed so I went with Pro. The good thing is it only cost $25. The Pro edition had the Android app access and I wanted that so I bought it. So below are the differences between the two and you can decide.

So once I decided I was going to build a Serviio server for my network I had to decide what platform I was going to put it on. I was leaning towards Linux but I already had a Windows box that wasn’t doing anything but using electricity so I used it. Installation is straight forward. You just download the install package and install it. Below are some of the requirements to run Serviio. Mine is a dual core with 2 gigs of memory. It works well but the cpu goes way up during usage so maybe a quad core would be better. So what every hardware or virtual you decide to use just keep that in mind.

Minimal requirements

512 MB of memory or more

150 MB of disk space (plus additional space for storing the media library), when using transcoding make sure there is at least 1GB free (depending on the original file size)

if on Linux, Java 8 must be installed. Windows and OSX come with Java runtime aready included in the installation.

Additional information

Linux users need to install the dcraw package if they need RAW image support

Only 64-bit OSX machines are supported, with OSX 10.8 minimum

Once installed it has a pretty easy to use interface. You tell it where you store your media and it scans it. One of the feature I like is that it downloads the cover pictures for the media along with the rest of the meta data. I use mine for moves and when you log into the web or android interfaces, you see all the picture and just click on it to play. Here are some pics of the server interface.

Now on thing I didn’t mention is security. You set the access password on the server and everyone uses that password to access the server. Only one person can access the server at a time so one password it all you need. However it would be better to have accounts and access by multiple people at a time. This would take a pretty powerful computer to run so maybe one account is the best choice.

Now the web interface isn’t to shabby either. It is designed well and easy to use. You can also create a play list, I really don’t have a use for this but it is a cool feature. It does take a little while to fully load, but it is a lot of pictures. The android interface loads faster. I never really use the web interface because I wanted the Android interface. We have a few Android media players and it really works great on these devices. Here is some pics of the two interfaces.

Another good thing is that Serviio has support for multiple mobile devices as well. The have apps for Android and Windows phone. There are also several different apps that you can choose from. They are third party and not directly supported by the group that makes Serviio. Anyhow I use this all the time. I really enjoy it and it works great.

The following are my dislikes about Serviio.

The movie metadata isn’t always correct. Not Serviios fault but can be annoying.

Have to buy pro to get mobile features. But they got to make their money somehow.

That’s it I really enjoy this program and use it all the time. One thing to note is that to use the program outside of the LAN you have to open port 23424 on your router. This is the port it talks on inside the network as well. But $25 isn’t bad for a fully functional media server. I recommend it to everyone that is looking for a good media server. I should also note it does music and pictures. I don’t use them yet but plan to move my music over to this server as well. Any how check it out. If you have any questions about performance, resource utilization, or anything else. Feel free to leave a comment. I will get back to you as soon as I have an answer for you. Thanks I how you find this informative.

A few months ago I build a Spacewalk server to automate patching of Linux machines. Well after a lot of banging my head against the wall I finally got the system work and auto updating. Depending on what you what you are looking for in your Spacewalk server will have an impact on what you really need to do. I was trying to get Red Hat patches to auto download and import into Spacewalk so when it came time to patch they were there and read to go. So here is what I did.

My first mistake was while testing the registering of systems I registered the Spacewalk server to itself. While this does work, to get Red Hat patches you need a system that is registered with Red Hat. So we did a little copy and replace to get the machine back to using the RHN network. Once this was done and it was registered we were ready to get started. We already had Mrepo installed so we could build a repos for the packages. Spacewalk doesn’t interact with Red Hat directly, if you want that you have to buy Red Hat Satellite. It is the Red Hat version of Spacewalk and come ready to go, unfortunately it was not in the card for me. So back to Mrepo. I used the rpm file I got from RPM find.net. Here is the link to the Mrepo files. Click here. Simple install and it is ready for configuration.

There are a few files you will need to look at. Then mrepo.conf file is located in etc and has login info for a Red Hat account, which you will need. The version I installed used /etc/mrepo.conf.d as the place to configure your channels to download from. The configuration of theses file is pretty straight forward and really doesn’t need my spin. But you will need one for each channel that you plan to download. Whether it be from Red Hat, CentOS, or Fedora. I am working with Red Hat so things are different, if you anted CentOS you don’t need mrepo at all. You can just download them straight into Spacewalk. I need the mrepo work around because you have to login to RHN to get these patches. Here is what the base channel config looks like.

You can customize a lot of these settings for location of files and what all you want to be in the repo. Anyway if you have not messed with Mrepo here is the basic config.

Next you will need to generate system IDs for each channel that you plan to download. This is simple and you just run the following command for each architecture. The following command is just a guide but you will need to know where you want to store the systemid file and you will need it to download from Red Hat. I stored mine in the /var/satellite directory. This is the default Spacewalk package storeage point as well.

Now that we have system IDs for each channel we will register with Red Hat for each channel. Once you register you will need to go into the RHN website and check the permissions for each registration so you can download what you need. So if you wanted Supplementary or optional packages you would check that box. You should know that each registration take 1 Red Hat license.

With that out of the way we will set up the mrepo download process. I had problems with Mrepo throwing an error I decided to run the download command manually. The command is a log string but it worked great for me. After it is done you would just run the mrepo generate command to build the repo. I built the system on RHEL 6 so maybe there are some problems with compatibility, but most likely I needed to install something to fix the problem. So if mrepo work fine you just run mrepo -ugvvv. It will update and build you repos. With my errors I did it this way.

This will take a while if it is the first time. It will pull down a few thousand packages. So I wrote a script that put this command in for each channel I wanted to download and then run the mrepo command at the end. This gives me all the package and you can check it by going to the mrepo webpage that will be hosted from you Spacewalk server.

With all of the packages downloaded I had to import then into Spacewalk. This was pretty easy and just required a command that you would of jumped to if you had CentOS or Fedora. This command imports and write the packages to the Spacewalk db. Spacewalk stores the packages in directory after directory so digging through /var/satellite/”channel name” will be a little on the crazy side. Anyhow, you need to have your channels configured in Spacewalk for each architecture you are going to have packages for. So in Spacewalk go to channels and create channel. You will want to put some thought into how you want to do this because it would require deleting and reimporting everything for any changes you wan to make. So the import command is the following.

Let me break this command down a little. My channels are all OS and arch, rhel5_x86_64_local. You will have to have the–server=http://localhost/APP statement in hte command for Spacewalk. It will fail without it. Finally the dir is the location you plan to pull the packages from. So if this was a repo on the internet that you could download from, you would just put the url here. This will also take a while to run for the first time. Once this is completed and runs correctly, you will have a channel in Spacewalk with a few thousand packages.

I also needed to get the Errata information for my Spacewalk server. For this I used some scripts that I found on the Internet. It is called ya-errata-import.pl. You can go to the Github for the script by clicking HERE. If you are using Red Hat like I am you will use the redhat-clone-errata.sh file. When you open it you will have to do a little configuration to set it up for the channels you need. This give you all the Errata imported into Spacewalk as long as the channels are updated. If you are missing packages it will not upload that particular Errata. But it works and I have all the Errata I need. Here is an example of the redhat-clone-errata.sh config.

There is a ya-errata-import.cfg file that will need some user account information so you can download and upload the Errata.

Now that we have all of the part working I just tied it together in two scripts. I grouped the mrepo stuf together and the Spacewalk stuff together.
This was to help if part of it error-ed out I could troubleshoot and it would not kill the entire process. So here are my two scripts that I put
together. Now the scripts my not be perfect but they work.

I added the fail over with the second part of the command. If it is pulling down a lot of packages it would time out about half way through.This seems to take care of it. Then once it downloads all of the packages it will build the repos for each channel. I have it log to a file
and have the exit code for each piece of the script. Then I can check the log and see if it ran ok or error-ed out.

The next part it the Spacewalk portion. This uploads to all of the packages from mrepo to Spacewalk channels. Then it imports the Errata.
You can set how far back you want it to go for the Errata download. I have it do a week after I imported the past year. Here is the Spacewalk
portion of the update scripts.

Now with the scripts put togetther I placed them in a folder in roots account. Then I changed the permissions to 700 on everything for the root account. That way only root could see the files due to password being in them. You can do security on these scripts anyway you want as long as the user that will run create the cron can have access to them. Finally you need to setup the cron jobs to have them run when ever you want them too. I have them run everyday at 0200 in the morning. This way my Spacewalk server is up-to-date at all times and ready to push out patches. So this a shot, it my help you or it may not. But it is a good start for someone who is starting from scratch. Good luck.

I recently built a Spacewalk 2.1 server to automate certain administration functions for my Linux machines. Installation was pretty straight forward as long as you don’t have any problems. However once I got it running it was really a great way to manage my systems. First let’s get a little info on the product.

Spacewalk is an open source Linux systems management solution. Spacewalk is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Satellite product is derived. Spacewalk manages software content updates for Red Hat derived distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, within your firewall. You can stage software content through different environments, managing the deployment of updates to systems and allowing you to view at which update level any given system is at across your deployment. A central web interface allows viewing of systems, their associated software update status, and initiating update actions. Spacewalk provides provisioning and monitoring capabilities, allowing you to manage your systems throughout their lifecycle. Via Provisioning, Spacewalk enables you to kickstart provision systems and manage and deploy configuration files. The monitoring feature allows you to view the status off your systems alongside their software update status.

Here is a pic of the WebUI.

With all of that out of the way I can talk about the installation process. You will need a base OS, for this I used CentOS 6 with no GUI. This help lower the overhead and you will not have much of a need for a GUI on the OS. However if you want one you can. Here is the link to the wiki that has the install information and any additional stuff you may need to research.

First you will need to add the Spacewalk and EPEL repos to the server. The Spacewalk repo is located at http://yum.spacewalkproject.org/ if you want to download the packages and do this manually. So to install the repo enter the following command.

Now you need to decide what type of database you want to use. You can use Oracle XE or PostgreSQL. I have built this server using Oracle 11g and with PostgreSQL. If you use a separate Oracle server you need to make sure the database permissions are set just as Spacewalk says. If not you will run into all kinds of problems right from the get go. Oracle setup can be found at the following link: https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/FullOracleSetup. But for this we will use PostgreSQL because it is easier to setup and you can use yum without downloading the Oracle packages.

yum install spacewalk-setup-postgresql

Now that the database server is installed we can move on to installing Spacewalk itself. For PostgreSQL we will use the following command

yum install spacewalk-postgresql

This will install the Spacewalk packages and set it up to use PostgreSQL. Spacewalk will need to have a FQDN that resolves. So you can use the hosts file or DNS to accomplish this. Once this is complete you will need to start the Spacewalk install and configuration. Start by entering the following command.

spacewalk-setup –disconnected

You will see output similar to the following. However the example below used Oracle.

Outbound open ports 80, 443, 4545 (only if you want to enable monitoring) Inbound open ports 80, 443, 5222 (only if you want to push actions to client machines) and 5269 (only for push actions to a Spacewalk Proxy), 69 udp if you want to use tftp.

The server is functional but you will need to do several more things to make it useful. You will need to configure users that can be accomplished in the Users tab. Also you will need to create channels for the packages. Creating channels is easy, but you need to decide if you want repos for these channels. This is accomplished in the channels tab by going to Manage Software Channels. You will need to create at least one channel. However I would create a channel for each OS and architecture you will be managing. Then create repos for each mirror repo you plan to have on the server. Then you can click on the channel and assign the repos to the channels you want them attached to. This is done by clicking on the channel, go to repositories, and check the box. Then you can select sync and Spacewalk will download the packages for you. This will take some time depending on size of the repo and when Spacewalk picks up the task.

Another way you can upload packages is using the physical media or ISO of the OS. You would mount it to the operating system. Spacewalk will not connect directly to RedHat so if you manage RHEL systems you will have to upload packages using this method. So if my DVD is mounted in media and is RedHat 6 I would use the following command.

The only things you would change is the channel name and the exact directory the packages are located. The switch –vvv give you a very verbose execution and http://localhost is required to work correctly. This process will take a long time depending on the number of packages and speed of the system.

Now that we have packages and users we will want to register systems to the Spacewalk server. You will need to create an activation key using the Spacewalk WebUI. On the overview screen click on manage activation keys. Then create new key. You can have it auto generate or enter a string yourself. I would create your own and enter something simple. The auto generated key is a long alphanumeric string. Now we will install the Spacewalk client repo, install some packages, and register the systems. This is done with the following commands. Remember to change the link based on the type of OS you are using.

There are two dependancies that may or may not be present. They are jabberpy and python-hashlib for RHEL 5 based OSes and just jabberpy for RHEL 6 based systems. You can install them as part of the YUM entry if they are in a repo you have installed or as standalone RPM files. Enter the following command to install the client packages.

We now have system and packages so you can try to install something to see if it is working. The following are some CLI commands that can be used to accomplish certain tasks.

Spacewalk-service — can be used with start|stop|status to control the Spacewalk service.

rhn_check – this command forces the OS to check in with the Spacewalk server. Spacewalk monitored systems check in around every 4 hours. So if you want something done know you need to run this command. Also using the –vvv switch will help you in troubleshooting any problems.

spacewalk-repo-sync –channel <yourchannel> –url <repo to sync to url> – This command will sync now instead of waiting for Spacewalk.

Rhnmd This command will force monitoring task to run now.

This is a good start for building your Spacewalk server. There are tons of features that can be added to make the server monitor systems resources, run Open SCAP scans on the systems, configuration management, and have Errata for different OSes. I had to stumble my way through a great deal of the setup because there is no show all document out there. So I hope this helps you on your way and good luck. I use this server every day and it makes takes so much easier. Good luck.